Greece

No glass news this past week or so due to duties of my "day job". I was in Athens, Greece for eight days. I attended a conference and presented a case study for one of the projects I led. One of the by-products of the economic downturn is the reduced number of flights available. This is especially true flying from Detroit, where I live. I have a bunch of upgrade certificates and I wanted to be able to fly business class due to the lengths of the flights. Using these certificates turns out to a lot more difficult in practice than it should. I finally found some flights with long layovers that left on a Thursday and got back the next Saturday.

That meant almost eight full days in Athens. I got there around 11 am local time on Friday, after a long layover in New York's wonderful JFK airport. I had part of Friday and all day Saturday for sightseeing. I did a ton of it, all walking. I'm not in shape and my calves certainly ached after probably eight miles of walking up and down hills, and climbing the Acropolis. Sunday mid-day thru Thursday were taken up by the conference itself - more on that some other time. Thursday night and Friday were taken up with more sightseeing. I had to get up at O'Dark Early (3:30am local time) to get to the airport for the flight to Amsterdam. I'm writing this post from the airline club lounge as I have about five hours of layover here as well. Seems like the number of flights is limited to one or two per day from almost anywhere making connections easier as you aren't OJ'ing it through the airport. If you don't know what OJ'ing it means, you are too young - Google it.

I took a bunch of pictures with my little Nikon camera - they turned out pretty well. I am quite pleased with how they turned out, although each and every one of them will need some Photoshopping touch ups. I did a quick tweak on the attached image of the Parthenon from the base of the Acropolis. I tweaked the contrast, saturation, and removed a crane that was partially visible which was distracting. This was a 5 minute job in Photoshop just to see how things look. I like it.